Jack Markell: Obama not exaggerating

The chair of the National Governors Association said on Monday that President Barack Obama isn’t exaggerating the impact of the deep, across-the-board spending cuts that will kick in this week if Congress doesn’t head off sequestration.

“Here’s the issue,” said Delaware Gov. Jack Markell, a Democrat, on CNN’s “Starting Point.” “If you’re one of the people, if you’re a kid in Head Start, and you’re going to be impacted, if you’re somebody who’s supposed to get some job training so you can go get a job and you’re not going to get it and you’re impacted, there’s no exaggeration for you.”

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Gov. Markell talks sequestration effects on states

The deadline to hammer out a sequestration deal is Friday, March 1. On Sunday, the White House released a summary of the “devastating impact the sequester will have on jobs and middle-class families across the country” on a state-by-state basis.

Some Republicans have charged that Obama is exaggerating the impact of those cuts. On Monday, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker said that there’s “no doubt” that the administration is using “scare tactics.”

“As governors, Democrat and Republican alike, we have to do this all the time, we have to make those tough choices and we find a better way than the scare tactics,” the GOP governor said on Fox News’s “Fox & Friends.” “For years I’ve heard, not just in state but even in local government, ‘If you don’t give us all this money at the local level, fire and police are going to go away’ or other things like that. Well, there’s always a better way.”

Walker called for authorizing the administration to make the necessary cuts, adding that there is “certainly enough waste to be cut in this town.”

But Markell said that if the automatic cuts are allowed to take effect, the country’s economic recovery will be thrown off track.

“… [The] most frustrating conversation any governor can have these days is when we talk to a business [person] who says, ‘I’d love to hire, but I can’t find people with the right skills,’” Markell continued. “So we have resources available for job training and if those resources get cut, it … stops the recovery in its tracks. And that’s just not what we should be doing.”